Dairy scheme 'cash cow for cabinet ministers'

The Federal Minister for Agriculture, Warren Truss, has been accused of milking a national dairy industry support program for the benefit of his own electorate.

Labor revealed that Mr Truss's electorate of Wide Bay in Queensland was the biggest single recipient of Dairy Regional Assistance Program (DRAP) funding. The payout to his electorate amounted to $6.2 million, according to research by the Parliamentary Library commissioned by Labor.

The second-highest funding went to the Lyne electorate of the Trade Minister, Mark Vaile, with $6 million. Together, the two electorates account for 20 per cent of DRAP funding.

The program, designed to help dairying communities dislocated by deregulation of milk marketing, is funded by a dairy tax of 11 cents a litre paid by consumers.

A spokesman for Mr Truss said Wide Bay received more funding than any other electorate because it had been hardest hit by deregulation, with a number of farmers being forced to sell their properties.");document.write("

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"A previous report shows that three out of five worst affected dairy regions in Australia are in Wide Bay and Lyne electorates. So it would be hard to imagine anyone seriously making the argument that those electorates shouldn't be receiving assistance to recover from deregulation of the dairy industry force on the farmers in those communities," the spokesman said.

According to Labor's research, the Liberal electorate of Paterson in NSW, which has been hard hit by deregulation, received only a quarter of the amount of DRAP assistance granted to Wide Bay.

The Australian Bureau of Agricultural Research Economics (ABARE) report in 2001 found there were 167 dairy farms in Paterson where the impact of deregulation was high, compared to 85 farms in Wide Bay.

The Opposition primary industries spokesman, Kerry O'Brien, said it was now clear that the distribution of DRAP funding was "heavily skewed in favour of a small number of Coalition MPs at the expense of many other regions affected by dairy deregulation".

"The National Party is now exposed as having used the DRAP program as a slush fund to prop up National Party electorates rather than to provide equitable assistance across regional Australia," Mr O'Brien said.

The spokesman for Mr Truss said "Kerry O'Brien has been making the same claims for years since the program started - suggesting there's some sort of bias towards National Party electorates under the Dairy Act program. There can't be because the program is transparent."

The spokesman said grants were selected by a local area consultative committee, consisting of local government and small business people, who refer the best applicants to the Department of Regional Services, which makes the final decision.

Mr O'Brien's research also found that Wide Bay and Mr Vaile's electorate, Lyne, were classified by ABARE as being three of the worst-affected regions despite having a lower number of affected farms.

Wide Bay received about half of the DRAP money distributed to Queensland.